


Spirals

by squintly



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Everyone has suits and guns, M/M, Organized Crime AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-29
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-06-05 07:37:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6695773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squintly/pseuds/squintly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they look at Kylo Ren they see his family; his mother with her shiny badge, his father on the witness stand, his uncle standing over his grandfather's cooling body as the greatest criminal empire ever assembled crumbled around them. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and Kylo's tree is poisoned.</p><p>Good thing Hux is really into botany.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spirals

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly don't know what the fuck happened. I set out to write gay gangsters and somehow I ended up with math and nigh-on anti-romance. I blame Kylo.

In the mirror was a man. Full lips, dark eyes, waves of hair he’d spent far too long on. Kylo’s hands curled into fists against the marble counter-top. He looked about twelve years old, and his father’s son.

 

The party was already in full swing by the time he slipped in. Funny, given it was supposed to be his. A handful of black-tie sycophants looked up and offered him bleach-white smiles, but their chatter didn’t even dim. God forbid anything interrupt their schmoozing. Kylo strode across the ballroom, trying to look more comfortable in his tuxedo than he was. The crowd parted before him, less water around a stone and more grease repelled by a drop of soap. Their eyes followed him, like chickens follow a fox.

 

Supreme Leader Snoke sat on a high-backed chair on a raised dais, resplendent in a tailored white suit. His veil shifted as he spoke and the diamond cuff-links at his wrists gleamed as he waved Kylo closer.

 

“Perfect timing as always,” the Supreme Leader said as Kylo moved to stand at the foot of the dais. “Dolores, my apprentice, Kylo Ren.”

 

The woman standing by the edge of the chair was short and podgy, too much make-up hiding creases and obviously dyed hair half-melted into torturous curls. Her dress was bubble-gum pink and cut more for a teenager going to prom than a matronly businesswoman. She gave Kylo a strained smile, her teeth like wedges of raw potato jammed into her mouth.

 

“Oh? Leia’s son, aren’t you? How lovely.”

 

Her tone dripped with sickly honey. Kylo thought briefly about choking her with the over-sized pearl necklace strung around her wrinkled neck. “I take after my grandfather.”

 

“A great man,” the woman said. “Truly… singular.”

 

 _Why don_ _’t you just say it, you dried-up old bitch_ , Kylo thought. _I_ _’m a traitor._

 

It was written all over the faces of every single boot-licker gathered to ‘welcome’ him into the fold. They looked at him and they saw his mother with her shiny badge, his father on the witness stand, his uncle standing over Vader’s cooling body as the greatest criminal empire ever forged crumbled around them. _The apple doesn_ _’t fall far from the tree_ , and Kylo’s tree was toxic. But none of them would come out and say it, the cowards. Instead they’d stare and whisper and needle him like somehow that made them clever.

 

“Miss Gramschap was just complaining about one Secretary Grimes,” Supreme Leader said in his deep grumbling voice. “Perhaps you can lend her some… assistance on this matter.”

 

Even through the pancake batter slathered over her face, Gramschap flushed. “Supreme Leader, I assure you, I can—”

 

“Assurances are not solutions,” Supreme Leader Snoke said, veil drifting as he turned to stare at her, eyes hazy shadows through the opaque silk. “You have failed. A new strategy is required.”

 

Gramschap flustered, but a wave of the Supreme Leader’s white-gloved hand shut her up before she could even speak. She sketched a courtesy and minced away, shooting Kylo a withering look. The corners of his lips ticked up.

 

“Do you think that was a victory?” Supreme Leader Snoke asked.

 

Swallowing, Kylo dropped his gaze. “No, Supreme Leader.”

 

“Good.” The veiled man sat back, gleaming in the yellow light. “Go. Mingle.”

 

Inclining his head, Kylo backed away. After a few steps he turned, slipping back into the crowd. They watched him, but always contrived to be looking elsewhere when he drew near, turning in on themselves or skittering off after a roving tray of champagne. Kylo felt like a shark swimming through a school of fish, life rippling all around him but infuriatingly out of reach. _Mingle_. Might as well tell the wolf to make friends with the sheep.

 

Kylo’s feet took him to the balcony. The night was cold for April, rain hanging heavy in the air. Droplets glittered on the flower arrangements arrayed next to the banister. After a moment’s contemplation Kylo lifted one elegant vase of lilies and threw it into the darkness as hard as he could. Far below, the porcelain smashed on the patterned brick.

 

“Allergic?”

 

Kylo jumped, silently cursing himself. The man wasn’t even lurking in the shadows, just leaning up against the wall next to the glass doors with a glowing cigarette in his hand. Tall, though not as tall as Kylo, with red hair and pale blue eyes that matched the shirt under his charcoal-grey suit jacket, he looked at Kylo with an easy dispassion that was both refreshing and disconcerting. Most people would at least look curious.

 

“Ren, isn’t it?” he asked, putting the cigarette to his lips.

 

For a moment, Kylo wasn’t sure who he was. He’d read hundreds of files, most with pictures but not all, and back-lit with smoke curling around his face the man was momentarily strange. Then the light shifted and Kylo remembered. “Hux.”

 

Hux inclined his head. An accountant, money-man, known for taking ten credits and turning it into ten million, tax-free, without raising a governmental eyebrow. _Odd party guest._

 

“What are you doing here?” Kylo asked.

 

Tapped ash drifted through the air, caught by a breeze and blown into the night. “I could ask you the same question.”

 

Kylo bristled. “It’s my party.”

 

“Is that why you’re murdering perfectly good shrubbery?”

 

“Careful,” Kylo said, slipping an edge into his voice. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”

 

“An assassin, I imagine.” Hux took another drag on the cigarette. “Or do you prefer euphemisms? ‘Wetworker’ seems crude, but to each his own.”

 

Kylo blinked. “You’re well informed for a number-cruncher.”

 

“If you want to know what someone’s up to, look at their receipts.”

 

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Kylo said slowly.

 

“You should,” Hux said, tapping off more ash. “You’re lucky we’re on the same side. I could put you in prison a dozen times over for illegal arms possession alone.”

 

Kylo looked away. “You think we’re on the same side?”

 

Dropping his cigarette, Hux ground it out with one perfectly shined wingtip shoe. “Snoke trusts you. I trust Snoke. Therefore I trust you. Anyone who comes to a different conclusion is ten times the traitor you are.”

 

With that, Hux slipped back into the golden light of the party, the scent of smoke clinging to him like armor. Kylo stayed for a long, long while, watching the stars.

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

Secretary Grimes was minister of health and safety, which in his coke-addled mind meant he was directly responsible for curtailing the traffic of arms into the country. Gramschap had been trying to talk him into retiring for years. All Kylo needed was one batch of bad cocaine.

 

Kylo sat in his hotel room, watching the coverage of his untimely demise. The ‘inevitable result’ of a ‘long and sordid’ history with pharmaceuticals, the pretty blonde woman said, perfectly tweezed eyebrows drawn in a facsimile of disappointed grief. Kylo fell asleep in his chair, satisfied with a job well done.

 

Then his burner phone rang.

 

“What?” he asked, shrugging sleep off like a cloak.

 

“Seven casualties,” Supreme Leader Snoke’s deep voice rumbled, horrendously calm. “Explain.”

 

“If he’d been the only one it wouldn’t have looked like an accident,” Kylo said, sitting up straight. “Are you displeased?”

 

“No. It will not be traced back to you?”

 

“No. I was careful.”

 

“You did well. Report to me when you return.”

 

A weight settled in Kylo’s stomach. The rest of the night and the flight early the next morning he spent mentally retracing his steps, trying to find the mistake. He couldn’t. Supreme Leader Snoke had stressed discretion and none of the others were important — junkies, the assistant Grimes was fucking, no-one worth making a fuss over. But there must have been _something_.

 

By the time he stood waiting outside Supreme Leader Snoke’s chambers, he was dark under the eyes and exhausted, mind spinning. When the door opened his heart pattered in his chest, but it was only Hux, dressed in robin’s-egg blue with his hair slicked back.

 

“Ren,” Hux said conversationally, as if they were meeting in an elevator and not the antechamber to the most powerful man on the continent. “I suppose congratulations are in order.”

 

“Are they?” Kylo asked, voice darker than he intended.

 

Hux considered him. “Regrets?”

 

“I did something wrong,” Kylo replied. “Supreme Leader Snoke is angry with me.”

 

“You did kill eight people.”

 

“They were no-one,” Kylo said, increasingly unsure as to why he was saying anything at all. “None of them mattered.”

 

“Everyone matters,” Hux said, fingers straying to his pocket and pulling out a crisp cigarette. “One person the public can shake off. Eight makes them paranoid. They panic. What if it’s all poison? Suddenly a ten billion credit industry is worth nine.”

 

“Not everything is about money,” Kylo snapped.

 

“No,” Hux said. “Some things are about sex.”

 

Before Kylo could respond, Supreme Leader Snoke’s voice rolled through the door. Hux tipped his head at him.

 

“Good luck.”

 

Kylo could have killed him.

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

Hux’s office was smaller than he expected, a tiny corner tucked into a larger complex of offices and cubicles distinguished from the rest only by the wire threaded through the inner windows. Kylo didn’t knock. No-one tried to stop him. Most of the hunched workers didn’t even look up.

 

Neither did Hux. “Did you need something?”

 

“You were right,” Kylo said, moving to sit across from Hux only to discover there was no chair. “How did you know?”

 

Hux wrote another entry in the huge leather-bound ledger spread across his desk, his handwriting small and impeccable. “Economics.”

 

“Junkies die every day. No-one cares about a few more.”

 

“People care about patterns.”

 

“They’re not that predictable,” Kylo snapped. “You can’t just look at a bunch of numbers and know what someone’s going to do.”

 

“You do know what economics is?”

 

“They’re just numbers! They don’t _mean_ anything!”

 

Finally, Hux looked up. Again his eyes were cold, dispassionate, the complete opposite of the underlings and errand boys who skittered out of Kylo’s path. “You’re not very good with money, are you?”

 

He was wearing a stripped blue tie. Off the top of his head, Kylo thought of four different ways to murder him with it. “You can’t know what’s going to happen.”

 

Slowly, Hux set down his pen. “You don’t trust me?”

 

 _Snoke trusts you. I trust Snoke. Therefore I trust you._ Kylo ground his teeth.

 

“I don’t understand.”

 

“Would you like to?”

 

“What are you going to do, send me back to fourth grade?” Kylo asked with a sneer.

 

“I have an hour every other Sunday,” Hux said, carefully closing the ledger and pulling out a small black notebook. “Is eleven convenient?”

 

Kylo stared at him. “You want to teach me economics.”

 

“You buy two hundred credit undershirts. It couldn’t hurt.”

 

“I do not.”

 

“You do. I have the receipts.”

 

“Go to hell.”

 

“I’ll pencil you in,” Hux said as Kylo slammed the door.

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

Kylo didn’t _intend_ to go. It was just that when he looked it up, he really _was_ buying two hundred credit undershirts, and seven hundred credit pants, and fifty credit socks. He’d never even thought about it. He just found ones he liked and never looked at the price-tag. Supreme Leader Snoke — or, he considered, Hux — always made sure there was more than enough in his account. And he had nothing better to do, and part of him still believed Hux was making the whole thing up.

 

When he arrived at the address listed in Hux’s file, he checked it, twice, sure there was some kind of mistake. Hux was a penthouse apartment kind of man, all tinted windows and angular modern furniture. This was a white semi-suburban bungalow tucked in amongst two-story palaces, more well-kept yard than house, with a giant oak tree in the back and barely blooming purple flowers laced through the picket fence. There were flowerbeds everywhere, still mostly buds and bright new leaves scattered with red and orange and yellow, and in the center of the front yard there was a pristine birdbath in the shape of a sideways snail shell. The front door was stained glass arranged in colorful spirals, and when Kylo knocked something inside chirruped.

 

Hux answered the door in a dove-grey suit, his only concessions to the weekend a single undone jacket button and a looseness to his cerulean tie. He nodded Kylo inside without a word. The interior of Hux’s house was just as out-of-character as the outside, all gauzy curtains and white wicker furniture with deep vivid cushions, potted plants in every corner and on every surface, even hanging from the stippled ceiling. Against one wall was a large vaulted bird cage, two mottled sky-colored budgies bouncing around and chirping at him.

 

“You have birds,” Kylo said, because _who the fuck are you_ would have been rude.

 

“How observant,” Hux said dryly, locking the door and leading Kylo to the kitchen. Only a half-wall covered in tiny planters separated it from the the living room. “I also have plants.”

 

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

 

“Plants are the biological expression of mathematical laws,” Hux said, gesturing for Kylo to sit at the glass dinette. “And everyone needs a hobby.”

 

“You take care of all this yourself?” Kylo asked. The wicker chair creaked slightly under his weight.

 

“When I can. I don’t always have time these days.” Sitting around the corner from Kylo, Hux slid a small stack of papers in front of him. “I designed a test to see where you stand. No sense in wasting time covering topics you already know.”

 

Kylo stared at it for a moment. Aside from being written on lined paper in Hux’s neat handwriting, it looked exactly like the math tests he remembered, right down to the stupid diagrams. “You’re serious.”

 

“Skills atrophy.” Hux handed him a pencil. “I don’t expect you to get them all. I just need to know what I’m working with.”

 

A thin crack of panic wound its way through Kylo’s chest. The very first question was a mess of letters and numbers, multiplication and division and — Kylo couldn’t even remember what they were called. Extensions? As nonchalantly as he could, Kylo flipped through the rest. There were symbols Kylo had never even seen. In an instant the paper was crumpling in his fist and ricocheting off the wall.

 

“This is stupid,” Kylo snapped as he stood.

 

“I’m sure you’ll remember—”

 

“Okay, I get it.” Cheeks burning, Kylo rounded on him, fists tight by his side. “You’re smarter than me. I could kill you with this pencil in eleven different ways. I win.”

 

“It’s not a competition.”

 

“Why am I even here? Why are you doing this? What’s the point? To humiliate me?”

 

Hux turned in his chair and crossed his legs. “You’re the most expensive agent we’ve ever had, and that was before you stifled the cocaine trade across half the eastern seaboard. Telling you to fuck off with your hundred and fifty credit breakfasts seemed like a good way to make an enemy and convincing you to submit an expense report like everyone else would make my life much, much easier. I’m tired of digging through your grubby, crumpled receipts.”

 

Kylo’s fingers flexed. He could feel the flush in his eyes. “I dropped out, alright? I had better things to do than… _this_.”

 

“When?”

 

“I don’t know. Fifteen. Whatever grade that is.”

 

Hux nodded, then stood. “Give me ten minutes.”

 

Kylo looked at him. “To do what?”

 

As he ambled off towards the other side of the house, Hux looked over his shoulder. “Write another test.”

 

After a minute of listening to the birds twitter, Kylo sat back down.

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

 _Exponents._ That’s what they were called. The second Sunday, Hux explained them using a pile of sugar cubes and for the first time they seemed to make a kind of sense.

 

“So if this—” Hux lined up three cubes in a row, “—is three to the power of one, and this—” the cubes piled up into a wall, “—is three to the power of two, what is three to the power of three?”

 

“A cube,” Kylo said.

 

“Very good. How many is that?”

 

Kylo took a minute. “Twenty-seven.”

 

“Correct. What about three to the power of four?”

 

The three-by-three-by-three block of cubes divided in his mind into a new row of larger segments. All he really had to do was count. “Eighty-one.”

 

“And so it goes, onto infinity,” Hux said, sweeping the sugar cubes back into his little porcelain bowl.

 

“Do I have to do all this in my head?” Kylo asked, catching one before it could hit the white tile floor.

 

“I’ll give you a calculator eventually. If you don’t understand the theory you won’t know how or when to apply it. They’ll just be numbers.”

 

A moment passed as Hux put the sugar away. He kept it on the highest shelf, and despite his height he still went up on his toes to push it to the back. Kylo wondered if there were ever children in this house, nieces or nephews or cousins. Hux’s file didn’t mention any living family, but it didn’t mention budgies or herbs growing on the windowsills either.

 

“You do this a lot?” Kylo asked, fiddling with the salvaged sugar cube. “Teach?”

 

“I tutored in university,” Hux said as he sat beside him. “And my father was a teacher, of a kind.”

 

Kylo popped the sugar into his mouth. “He trained Palpatine’s enforcers.”

 

“He did.” Hux took a piece of paper from the pile on the nearby counter and began scrawling questions down the page. “And after the fall of the Empire, he trained Snoke’s, for a time. You’re lucky you missed him.”

 

Something in Hux’s voice gave Kylo pause. “You didn’t like him.”

 

“He was my father,” Hux said, scrawling something then erasing it and writing it again. “It wasn’t my place to like him or not.”

 

“I didn’t like my father either.”

 

Hux glanced up at him through his eyebrows. “Is that supposed to be new information?”

 

Kylo smiled and Hux passed him the paper.

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

The third Sunday Kylo was halfway across the country, carefully corroding a break line. The day before a flustered runner with big brown eyes and freckles handed him a folder full of math problems. If she looked, she didn’t say anything. Kylo did them on the flight.

 

When Hux looked over them, his expression changed for the first time, eyebrows tilting up slightly as he nodded. “Very good. You’re a fast learner.”

 

“Not really,” Kylo said, pushing a fingertip through the bars of the bird cage. One of the budgies — Ishmael, he was pretty sure, Ahab’s stripes were darker — nipped at the side of his nail. “This is pretty easy once you know what you’re doing.”

 

“As are most things,” Hux replied. “Did you use a calculator for this?”

 

“No. But it did take me four hours.”

 

“Better to do something correctly and slow than incorrectly and fast.” Sitting on his cerulean-blue-cushioned wicker sofa, Hux crossed his legs and flipped through the papers again. “I didn’t expect you to get half of these. Well done.”

 

Kylo looked at him, frowning. “Why did you give me something you didn’t think I could do?”

 

“Mistakes are the best way to learn. If you aren’t failing fifty percent of the time what you’re doing isn’t hard enough.”

 

“That’s not how Supreme Leader Snoke sees it,” Kylo said, pulling his finger out of the cage. Ishmael chirped at him. “Anything less than perfection is failure.”

 

“I suppose physical disciplines require a different philosophy.” Hux put the papers on the end table, edge under a flower pot to keep them from blowing away in the breeze drifting through the open windows. “A lot of things have to go wrong to injure yourself doing maths.”

 

Kylo ambled over and sat in the arm chair, pushing a billowing curtain out of the way. Hux watched him now, the way he never had before, yet not the way other people did at all. Hux didn’t make him feel small.

 

“Why are you doing this?” he asked after a long silence.

 

“I told you. You’re expensive.”

 

“No, I mean…” Kylo sat forwards. “Why are _you_ doing this? Why not hand me off to someone else?”

 

The corners of Hux’s mouth twitched. “Would you listen to anyone else?”

 

“I don’t know why I listen to _you_.”

 

“Everyone needs a hobby,” Hux said, “and it’s nice to have a friend.”

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

Hux taught him about Fibonacci, showed him the spiral in flowers and leaves and the shell bird bath outside. He showed him fractal branching in the leaves of a fern and explained the way a river’s meandering could be used to calculate pi. He made him listen to boring old music to hear the fractions in it, 3/4 time and eighth notes and the ratios between notes in a chord, the music getting a little less boring as Ishmael and Ahab twittered along. He offered to teach Kylo how to dance. Kylo laughed in his face.

 

Hux gave him a book one Sunday, a little black date book like Hux’s. “Keep track of what you’re spending,” he said. “Tally it up at the end of the day. If it’s more than a thousand credits, justify why.” The first few days he barely broke a hundred, but then a businessman two cities over decided he would rather risk Witness Protection than keep paying his debts, and that was eight hundred credits just for first-class airfare, and the hotel room he usually booked was eight thousand credits a night, and then there was room service and rental cars and of course duct tape and zip ties and garbage bags and bleach. As he waited for the blood to drain from the corpse’s severed throat, he tallied it all up and realized in the course of thirty six hours he’d spent ten grand.

 

“I get the point,” Kylo said, tossing the book to Hux as he slipped inside. The spring flowers were getting past their prime and a petal drifted in after him.

 

“Good,” Hux said with a hint of a smile.

 

That day, when Kylo got up to leave, Hux patted him on the shoulder. “Stay. I’ll make sandwiches.”

 

Kylo stayed. The sandwiches were very good.

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

Snow was dusting the dusky streets outside. Kylo fed tiny pieces of dried mango to the birds while Hux went over his latest assignment, a statistical analysis of several different brands of fertilizer that had Kylo looking up quarterly revenues till four in the morning.

 

“Well,” Hux said with a sigh, tossing the report onto the end table. “I can find no fault with it.”

 

Ahab nipped at Ishmael and Kylo nudged them apart, opening his palm so they could take as much as they wanted. “Then why do you sound so disappointed?”

 

“Because,” Hux said as he stood, “I have nothing left to teach you.”

 

Kylo looked up at him. Around November Hux had started wearing turtlenecks under his jackets on Sundays, and today’s was a warm dark brown that made Kylo think of wood and acorns and home. “What do you mean?”

 

“There’s plenty I _could_ teach you,” Hux said, pulling a packet of smokes from the pocket of his cream blazer. “But it wouldn’t be _useful_ to you in any way. Not unless you’re looking to change careers.”

 

Kylo had never seen Hux smoke inside. Usually he went out on the red brick patio out back, rain or shine, tapping ash into a covered dish patterned with sunflowers and watching the oak rustle in the breeze. Kylo blinked at him.

 

“It’s only been what, eight months?”

 

“Nine.” Smoke spiraled out of Hux’s mouth. “I didn’t expect you to have a knack for it.”

 

Kylo tilted the remaining mango into the birdcage and shut the door. “I don’t.”

 

“Please,” Hux scoffed. “You’ve already learned more than most manage in years.”

 

“You’re a good teacher.”

 

“Not that good. Why do you think I turned to organized crime?”

 

Kylo smiled at him. “It pays better.”

 

“That is true.”

 

Hux paced towards the kitchen and Kylo followed. There were dinner rolls in the oven and pasta on the boil, filling the whole house with warm, comfortable smells. Hux cracked a window and blew the smoke out. Steam billowed and the burner flames flickered.

 

“I’m still failing half my assignments,” Kylo pointed out, leaning against the counter-top.

 

“Only because I’m making them absurdly difficult,” Hux replied. “Creating them is taking up more and more of my time, and there isn’t much more I can give. I’m sorry.”

 

“Don’t be,” Kylo said, brushing mango dust off his hand. “The Order comes first.”

 

Hux sucked in smoke and blew it out into the gathering night. “Yes, it does.”

 

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Hux didn’t look at him, watching the snow come down. His cigarette flared and dimmed and smoke streamed from his narrow nose.

 

“I know quite a bit about you,” he finally said, without turning.

 

Kylo raised an eyebrow. “Do you?”

 

“I know you let the tank on your car run almost empty before you fill it up again. I know you prefer hotel rooms with black-out curtains. I know you dye your hair and wear size fourteen shoes and order linguine whenever it’s available. I know your taste in pay-per-view pornography.” Kylo drew back, but Hux didn’t blink. “I know you don’t drink alcohol, except on the thirteenth of July and the twenty-first of October. I don’t know the significance of those dates, but I do know you buy a bottle of vodka the day before and a bottle of painkillers the day after. I know when you were a child Snoke bought you green tea ice cream every Saturday afternoon. I know he bought you your first gun when you were sixteen. I know the first person you killed.”

 

Shivers crawled under Kylo’s skin. The cigarette slowly burned down, ash crumbling into the sink.

 

“I know all these things, but I still have no idea who you are. I never actually expected you to take me up on my offer, and now it’s nine months later and you’ve exceeded every one of my expectations and I don’t know what to do with you. What am I supposed to say, to a man like you?”

 

Kylo didn’t speak. He’d forgotten the ice cream.

 

After a minute, Hux turned to the pot on the burner, giving the ribbons of pasta a stir. He seemed to be bracing for something, tension in his shoulders and his long pale hands. When he poured the pasta into a strainer, boiling water splashed up onto his knuckles and he hissed.

 

“You alright?” Kylo asked quietly.

 

“I’ll be fine,” Hux replied.

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

“Miss Gramschap has become a nuisance,” Supreme Leader Snoke said, ominous and pale in the dim candle-lit room. “I trust eliminating her will give you no pause.”

 

“No, Supreme Leader,” Kylo replied.

 

“Good.” Thin eyelids slid over Snoke’s dark eyes like the membranes of a shark. “You are distracted.”

 

Kylo breathed. Part of him had hoped Snoke wouldn’t notice. “Hux has been… monitoring me.”

 

“As is his profession.”

 

“This is beyond—” Swallowing, Kylo dropped his gaze. “This is personal.”

 

“Less disciplined minds often succumb to the temptation of power. Especially when sentiment is involved.”

 

Kylo blinked. “Sentiment?”

 

“He is infatuated with you. Surely you sensed it.” When Kylo didn’t respond, Supreme Leader Snoke continued. “Base motivations are often overlooked by those who rise above them. Pay closer mind. Such desires are easily manipulated.”

 

“Yes, Supreme Leader.”

 

“Make Gramschap a message. Traitors die screaming.”

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

Dolores Gramschap lived on the side of a hill ten miles outside the city, affording the sprawling modern mansion no government employee could ever afford a brilliant view. Mostly floor-to-ceiling glass, it provided her with little privacy, or protection. Seclusion was her wall. It did little to stop Kylo.

 

He hated snow. Lying in it for hours waiting for the perfect moment, it soaked into his clothes and drifted down the back of his neck and stuck to his eyelashes, filling the world with fuzzy white shadows. As the fall got heavier, he put on a pair of goggles that limited his peripheral vision and fogged if he breathed wrong, forcing him to pull down his mask. His gloves weren’t quite warm enough and by midnight his fingers were uncomfortably numb.

 

“Come on,” Kylo murmured, scanning the scope of the sniper rifle along the long lines of windows. “Let me kill you.”

 

She was home — every so often, Kylo saw a shadow, or feet, lights turning on and off — but the grade of the hill masked half the house in roof and floor. Sooner or later he’d get a shot. But as she had been at the party, Gramschap was an infuriating bitch. Night ticked over into morning and still, nothing. She hadn’t gone to bed. Her black-sheeted minimalist nightmare was in full view.

 

Finally, just past one, a figure slid into view. Kylo held his breath—

 

It was a boy. Fifteen or sixteen. _Nephew_ , Kylo’s memory of Gramschap’s file supplied. His finger came off the trigger and he grit his teeth. The boy, short and round like his aunt, pottered up the stairs without taking his eyes off his phone, throwing up his middle finger to someone Kylo couldn’t see. _This is good_ , Kylo told himself. _Messages are better with witnesses._

 

As the boy reached the top of the stairs, Gramschap came stomping after him, hands on her broad hips and finger waving. There was almost no wind and Kylo had the high ground. All he had to do was account for the glass.

 

Headlights flashed on the periphery of his vision.

 

There were enforcers at either end of the service road but they’d be driving dark, it didn’t make sense. Tires crunched through snowy gravel as Kylo scrambled to his feet, bringing the rifle to bear on the beat-up red pickup truck cresting the hill. The lights blinded him. He hesitated. The driver was a girl.

 

She hit reverse so hard the tires screeched and the truck lurched back down the slope. Kylo’s finger was on the trigger but he didn’t pull. A gunshot would send Gramschap scrambling and she had a safe room. Kylo had seen the blueprints. He hadn’t brought a jammer— he wanted Gramschap to call the police so they could arrive just as she bled out on her black marble floor. He’d need a blowtorch he didn’t have to get through that door and if he left so would Gramschap and there were enforcers at either end of the service road. He had no idea how the girl got past them in the first place but she wouldn’t do it twice. Kylo whirled, knelt, aimed. The truck dropped out of sight. Gramschap was throwing her hands in the air and heading back into the other side of the house.

 

An echoing bang and she was falling to her knees, a jacketed hollow-point shredding her intestines. A second shot hit her in the kidneys. In thirteen minutes the paramedics would arrive just in time to hear her last words.

 

Slinging the rifle over his shoulder, Kylo sprinted down the hill. The road curved as it descended and the headlights disappeared. Someone was going to die for this.

 

When he got to the spot where the service road split off from the main, no-one was there. The only tracks in the snow were the truck’s. Kylo followed them back towards the city. At the next service road two miles down sat an abandoned SUV, both doors hanging open. There was a body lying in the snow. When he got close Kylo recognized him — Slip, a pale brown-eyed idiot who’d been with the First Order for even longer than Kylo had. The snow behind his head was muddy red, but when Kylo checked his pulse it was strong and steady. Kylo slapped him.

 

“Wha?” the dazed man bumbled after the second slap.

 

“Where’s the other one?”

 

“Wha?”

 

Kylo grit his teeth. “The other enforcer. Or did you leave him behind as well as barricading the _wrong fucking road_?”

 

Slip’s eyes went wide and he sat up, far too fast. Kylo pushed him back down, hand around his throat. “ _Where is he?_ ”

 

“Finn.” Slip swallowed. “I don’t know. There was a truck, a girl — the gunshots spooked him, he—”

 

Kylo had heard enough. He stood, drew the pistol from his shoulder holster and unloaded the entire clip into Slip’s chest. Then the rifle was in his hands and he was swinging, smashing the back window of the SUV, and the side windows, and the panels, and the frame, until the rifle snapped and he tossed the pieces into the night with a scream.

 

A few deep breaths and he was calm again.

 

He started back up the hill. The other enforcers were, hopefully, four miles away, and Kylo needed a ride.

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

Kylo sat staring at a wall.

 

Supreme Leader Snoke did not punish him. That would have been too easy. Instead he left Kylo to punish himself. And so Kylo sat staring at a wall, stewing in his fury and shame.

 

He should have shot the girl. Gramschap he could have rooted out eventually. Now this _no-one_ was in the wind, with an image of his face clear in her mind. He should have let the damn goggles fog.

 

He’d never failed this completely.

 

Some time had passed when the door quietly creaked open. Kylo didn’t look up, but he knew it was Hux. The man smelled of cigarette smoke and birdseed and no-one else would dare come here. Not now.

 

“When you said you slept in a chair,” Hux said quietly as he slipped into the barren room, “I didn’t quite believe you.”

 

Kylo didn’t reply. If they were in Hux’s sunny plant-filled house Hux would have sunk onto a cerulean cushion and sighed, Ahab and Ishmael twittering and hopping about their cage. But there were no plants, no birds, no cushions, no windows draped in gauzy white curtains that billowed like clouds. Just the straight-backed armchair Kylo wouldn’t let himself sit in and concrete. Hux lent against the wall.

 

“The trace came back on that license plate you gave us. Her name is—”

 

“I don’t care.” Kylo’s voice sounded strange. He took a deep breath. “Where is she?”

 

“We’re not sure. I’m tracking her cards and all eyes are peeled. We’ll find her eventually.”

 

He was trying to be reassuring. Kylo was not reassured. There was all the time in the world between now and eventually. He drew his knees closer to his chest, hands flexing in his gloves. Now they were too warm.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

Kylo’s eyes flicked to Hux as suspicion leapt into his chest. There were traitors aplenty today. “For what?”

 

“Finn,” Hux said. “He was one of my father’s. As was Slip, actually.”

 

“Your father was a genius at training traitors and fools.”

 

“He didn’t finish. He wanted me to take over when he died, but I—” Hux’s jaw clenched. “I believed my talents lay elsewhere. If I had honored his wishes none of this would have happened.”

 

“You think you could cure stupid?”

 

The corners of Hux’s mouth ticked up. “It worked on you, didn’t it?”

 

Leather creaked as Kylo’s hands curled into fists. Hux’s half-smile vanished. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

 

“How did you mean it?”

 

“You’re not stupid.”

 

“Only compared to you, is that it?”

 

“Even compared to me.”

 

“Did you think I’d be so grateful I’d spread my legs? Let you fuck me?”

 

Heat flared in Hux’s cheeks. “Nothing of the sort.”

 

“Then you expected _me_ to fuck _you_?” Suddenly Kylo was on his feet. “Is that what you want?”

 

“Ren—”

 

Kylo hit him. Not as hard as he could have, but enough to knock Hux to his knees, clutching his bruised stomach. Kylo’s boot cracked into his ribs and he went all the way down.

 

“You’re nothing,” Kylo said, without a trace of anger in his voice. Just stating facts. “Get out of my room.”

 

When Hux was gone, hands shaking as he straightened his charcoal-grey suit, Kylo settled into his chair.

 

And stared at the wall.

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

An informant found her. She was at a dive bar, with Finn the traitorous shit. And two older men. One, grey-haired and wry, and the other brown and bearded. The informant didn’t know who they were. Kylo had a sick feeling he did.

 

This time Kylo took a jammer. This time Kylo took _everything._

 

A few seconds after they pulled up in front of the bar, the girl stormed out, shouting something over her shoulder. Finn’s dark head popped out the door, saw the line of SUVs and ducked back inside.

 

“Get the traitor,” Kylo instructed as he got out of the car. “I’ll get the girl.”

 

She walked quickly down the street, more preoccupied with getting away than going anywhere. She was nothing special, just a slight of a thing with bound-up brown hair and a puffy winter coat two sizes too big. Kylo’s long legs quickly brought him up behind her. Glancing over her shoulder, her pace increased, but she didn’t break into a run, just walking and walking until the line of convenience stores and pay-day loan offices broke into a narrow alley. Kylo ducked in after her. The alley ended in a high brick wall and the girl had a gun in her hand.

 

“Stay back.”

 

Kylo almost grinned. “You’re _someone_ , aren’t you?”

 

“I said, _stay back._ _”_

Taking another step forward, Kylo tilted his head. “What are you? Local? Federal? Task force?”

 

“I’ll shoot,” the girl said, all but pressing the slightly trembling barrel of the pistol to his forehead.

 

“No, you won’t.”

 

Crushing her wrist popped the gun out of her hand and Kylo caught it, twisting her arm and spinning her around so he could crook his elbow under her throat, a simple squeeze and yank from snapping her neck. Passing the gun to his other hand, he pressed it into her side.

 

“But I will. This doesn’t have to end badly.”

 

“Let me go,” the girl grit, fingers digging into his arm. Kylo tightened his grip.

 

“You were trying to get behind me, weren’t you. But the idiots gave you the wrong road. Who are you working for?”

 

“Let me _go!_ ” Just as she kicked back at him, gunshots reverberated through the still winter air. She thrashed, but all Kylo had to do was tighten his grip, put just the right amount of pressure on just the right places and she went limp. Tires screeching, one of the SUVs pulled up in front of the alley. There was a bullet hole in the bumper.

 

“Police!” called the big blonde enforcer — Phasma.

 

Kylo scooped the girl up in his arms. “I noticed.”

 

Another lackey opened the door for him and he shoved the girl inside, stepping in himself only once she was secure. The gunfire was getting louder and more frequent, screams of fear and pain echoing down the street. Kylo slammed the door.

 

“Drive.”

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

The girl woke with a snort. It had taken longer than Kylo expected for the drugs to wear off, and her eyes were still bleary, unfocused. Gradually, they fixed on him.

 

“Where am I?”

 

“You’re my guest.”  Kylo stood and paced to her side, ignoring her flinch. Her wrists were already red from the restraints, and as he undid them her delicate hands flexed. “Your legend is excellent. Did you come up with it yourself? A scavenger stealing metal from the old power-lines, twenty years of misdemeanors and bolt cutters and pay stubs from that two-bit garage. A masterpiece, truly. It almost looks real.”

 

“It is real,” the girl said, glaring at him as if she were insulted by the very thought.

 

“But it isn’t everything, is it?” Kylo asked. “There’s training in there, somewhere. Or you’d be afraid.”

 

She took a breath, rubbing at the bruises his grip left on her arm. “Maybe you aren’t that scary.”

 

Kylo smiled. Her accent was charming. _She_ was charming, in an irritating sort of way. A worthy opponent. “The men you were with. Who were they?”

 

Her eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you ask them?”

 

“They’re not dead, if that’s what you’re worried about. They escaped. We’re looking for them now, but if they are who I think they are we won’t find them, no matter what you say. You can’t betray them.”

 

She considered him for a long moment. She wouldn’t talk, of course. But she didn’t have to, to tell him what he wanted to know. He could see the thoughts boiling under her skin. “He told me about you.”

 

Kylo made a show of blinking. “Did he?”

 

“You’re a monster.”

 

“I do what I have to.”

 

“No.” She shook her head, disgust raising her lips and furrowing her brow. “You _chose_ this. You betrayed your family.”

 

The rage came suddenly and Kylo’s palms were slamming against the tilted wire bed-frame on either side of her head. “My family betrayed _me_.”

 

“You were out.” The girl practically spat in his face. “You could have lived a normal life.”

 

“What normal life?” Kylo snapped. “Moving every six months, new names, new lives, crying myself to sleep every night because _they_ were too busy destroying everything my grandfather ever built to care about the son they didn’t even want? Getting shipped off to my uncle’s hippie-dippie commune like an _orphan_?” Taking a deep breath, Kylo forced himself calm. “You can understand that, can’t you? Being abandoned.”

 

An edge of something desperate cracked into the girl’s dark eyes. “They’re coming back.”

 

“They left you on a doorstep like you were nothing.”

 

“They’re _coming back._ ”

 

He could keep pressing her. He had tools. But why ruin such a pretty face when all you had to do was let her stew?

 

“If you cared about someone,” he said, stepping back, “would you make them wait fourteen years?”

 

The girl said nothing. Kylo replaced her restraints, looser this time, and left her alone with her thoughts. A few hours, maybe a day, alone in a room staring at a wall, and she’d be more than willing to tell him anything he wanted to know. And by then, he wouldn’t be so tempted to strangle her.

 

And around the corner was Hux, leaning against the wall and waiting for him and on some level Kylo knew if he killed the man he’d have hell to pay but an increasingly large percentage of him didn’t care.

 

“Stay away from me.”

 

“Ren,” Hux said as he moved to follow him.

 

“I said.” Kylo turned and Hux’s back was against the wall, blue eyes widening a fraction as Kylo loomed over him. “Stay. The fuck. Away.”

 

This time, Hux stayed put.

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

The girl was gone. Some _god damn_ how, the girl was gone.

 

Kylo grabbed Phasma’s arm as she passed, gripping her black suit so tightly the fabric wrinkled. “Find Hux.

 

She nodded and didn’t ask why.

 

He had no reason being in that hallway. No reason to be anywhere on that side of the compound. He called the Supreme Leader ‘Snoke’ and openly disagreed with him and if Kylo had been paying attention he would have seen this coming a mile away. He should have gone to Supreme Leader Snoke but his shame weighed heavy on his chest. He’d been in the man’s house. He’d eaten at his table. He’d thought of him…

 

Not as a friend. Kylo didn’t have friends. But as someone he could trust.

 

A scavenger caught up in intrigue beyond her station would just try to run. There were a dozen men headed to the garage already, and she wasn’t just a scavenger. Couldn’t be. So where would she go?

 

She’d gather evidence. The ledgers where all the Order’s secrets were kept. And who else but Hux to show her the way?

 

The office block was empty, the silent red lights sending all the workers scrambling to the wind. They were supposed to burn it all. The place stunk of gasoline, but no-one had lit a match. The girl was in Hux’s office, Finn at her side, rummaging through drawers and cabinets and sending paper flying in every direction. Hux was nowhere to be seen. Kylo holstered his gun. He didn’t need it to kill them.

 

As he stormed towards the door, a voice called out behind him. “Ben.”

 

Kylo froze. His hands balled to fists at his side. “I knew it was you.”

 

“It’s been a long time. Turn around. Let me see my son.”

 

As casually as he could, Kylo turned. Han looked thirty years older instead of fifteen, hair gone grey and lines etched deep into his face, made worse by the barely managed pinch of concern. “Little late, don’t you think?”

 

Han shook his head. “It’s never too late.”

 

From one of the other offices, Chewie peeked out, holding the same old revolver Kylo had played with as a child. He was as big and broad and hairy as ever, and angrier than Kylo had ever seen him, thick brows furrowed and lips scowling behind the long beard.

 

“Here to arrest me, or here to kill me?” Kylo asked.

 

“We’re here to take you home.”

 

“Home?” Kylo almost laughed. The main door creaked open and a handful of enforcers crept in. “Which one? There’s been so many.”

 

“Listen to me—”

 

“No.” Fire boiled in the pit of his stomach. “I’m not listening to you ever again.”

 

“Ben—”

 

“That’s not my name!” The gun was back in his hands and Chewie was aiming at him and the enforcers were aiming at Chewie and the pair behind him, watching through the wired glass. “He was weak and stupid like his snitch of a father and I killed him. I killed him _years_ ago.”

 

“No,” Han said softly, staring at him down the gun barrel. “He’s standing right here.”

 

They were watching him. All of them. Staring at him, with dull chicken eyes, waiting for him to snap one way or the other. Tears brimmed in his eyes and he blinked them away. What did Han expect him to do, drop the gun? Beg for forgiveness? Prove all the snickering sycophants right, that the apple really didn’t fall far from the tree, that he was no better than…

 

He couldn’t turn traitor twice.

 

A hole appeared between Han’s eyes. The bang rang in his ears, then transmuted into a _whoosh_ as the gasoline fumes caught. The blast knocked him back, and then he was scrambling through an office door and out the broken window, gunfire rattling off as he rolled heavily onto the snow. His suit was singed, his skin stung and when he picked himself up there was a rough circle of blood in the slush where his belly had been. He refused to focus on the pain. He refused to focus on anything. Anything led to his father falling and the inside of his head and the look of hope in his eyes that went out with his life. Bile bubbled in the back of his throat.

 

A bullet whistled by his head. When he looked up the girl was running backwards, still trying to shoot at him despite Finn dragging her into the thick woods that shielded the compound from the road. Kylo followed them. As they darted through the trees Finn turned and let off a shot that bit deep into Kylo’s shoulder. It didn’t matter. None of this did. The compound was burning and there were sirens in the distance and his father was dead. He fired back and Finn went down. The girl screamed at him, emptying her clip into trees and the spaces Kylo used to be.

 

“You can’t win,” Kylo said, ducking behind a tree and letting her reload. “I’m better than you. Stronger.”

 

“Go to hell,” the girl shouted back.

 

“You don’t have to die today.” An idea occurred to him, simple and desperate and impossible and he clung to it like the last thread holding him together. “We could use someone like you. I can train you. Teach you.”

 

A bullet ricocheted off the tree, wood chips stinging his cheek. Kylo pressed his back to the bark for a moment. The wound in his side went all the way through. Pressure didn’t help, it just hurt, leaving his fingers slick and his heart pounding.

 

“You never have to be alone again.”

 

For a moment the girl was quiet. _I_ _’m reaching her,_ Kylo thought, _it_ _’s going to work_. A companion, a sister, someone he could trust who would trust him, someone who wasn’t afraid—

 

And then she was running and shooting and he was shooting back, but every one of his shots missed and every one of hers hit home. Blood welled in his mouth and he fell to his knees.

 

She held the gun up, leveled at his head. There were angry tears in her eyes. Relief flooded through him like a sea. His pistol fell into the snow with a muffled thump.

 

She didn’t pull the trigger. She just stared at him, with something in her eyes that felt like pity.

 

More gunshots rang out and the girl turned and ran back the way they had come. Kylo fell to his side. It didn’t matter. He was going to die anyway. It was over, all of it, everything he’d worked so hard, done so many things to protect. All the blood was for nothing.

 

Someone rolled him onto his back. It was Hux.

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

He woke up to sunlight streaming through gauzy white curtains and the chirrup of birds. Everything hurt. There was a vase full of sunflowers on the white wicker dresser and bandages wound so tightly around his torso it hurt to breathe and an IV hung from a picture hook on the wall in his arm. The painting sat under the window, a field of sunflowers under a brilliant blue sky.

 

When Kylo tried to get his feet under him they wouldn’t and he fell hard, knees jarring on the well-worn hardwood. The quiet murmur of conversation stopped. Before he could try again, Hux was standing in the doorway, in slacks and an undershirt and bandages around his shoulder. There was stubble on his jaw.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

Kylo realized he didn’t have an answer. Hux sighed and eased up next to him, as if he expected Kylo to lash out like a cornered animal, then awkwardly helped him back into bed. One of his hands was warm and the other was slightly cool, and the cool one had no strength in it to speak of. When they were done, there were spots of blood prickling through the gauze on his shoulder and his side just above his hip.

 

“Who shot you?” Kylo asked.

 

“The girl. And Phasma, initially,” Hux replied, perching on the edge of the bed. “Apparently you told her I was a traitor.”

 

“Are you?”

 

Hux looked at him. He seemed diminished, somehow, rusted around the edges. “No, Ren, I’m not.”

 

“You were in the hallway before she escaped.”

 

“I was—” Hux’s gaze dropped. With slightly unsteady hands he pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pants pocket, then put it back. “I was worried about you.”

 

“ _Worried_.”

 

“You don’t take failure well.” Hux gestured vaguely. “I thought I could… help, somehow. Remind you it wasn’t the end of the world.”

 

“It was.”

 

Hux let out a long, slow breath. “No. The world never ends. It just changes.”

 

For a long while, neither of them said anything. Ahab and Ishmael twittered and sang, making metallic clinks as they hopped around their cage.

 

“Why did you save me?” Kylo finally asked.

 

“Because I’m an idiot,” Hux replied with another sigh. “And because you deserve better than to bleed out in the snow. Even after everything.”

 

Kylo stared at the wall. Eventually, Hux continued, sounding defeated in a way he never had before. “I’ll stay away. Once you’re healed enough to move we’ll get you somewhere safe and you’ll never have to see me again.”

 

Kylo said nothing. For a moment, he thought Hux was going to cry. Then he stood up and turned to walk away.

 

Kylo caught his wrist.

 

“Stay.”

 

Hux did.

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

Two days later, while Hux was cleaning his wounds, Kylo worked up the courage to confess.

 

“I killed my father.”

 

Hux glanced up at him, wiping puss from the hole in his side. “I know. They’re talking about it on the news.”

 

“I hated him. He was nothing to me.”

 

“But you still feel sick,” Hux said quietly. Kylo nodded. “That’s how it was for me, too.”

 

Kylo blinked. “What?”

 

“He raised me like one of the boys he took. Taught me that strength was everything. Then he got sick. Suddenly he couldn’t walk or talk or wipe himself. He always thought I was weak, but when I put the pillow to his face he couldn’t lift a finger to stop me.” Pouring antiseptic onto a cotton pad, he pressed it against the wound. “I went to live with my aunt after that. This house was hers. She wanted me to make something more of myself, something legitimate, but a hundred thousand credits of student loan debt doesn’t pay itself, and then she got sick as well. So in the end, I betrayed them both.”

 

Kylo thought for a moment. “Is that why you’re nice to me?”

 

A tired smile quirked at the corners of Hux’s lips. “Among other things.”

 

As Hux did his bandages back up, Kylo realized the cigarette smell was all but gone. He smelled like soap, birdseed, clipped leaves. There was green under his fingernails. Kylo closed his eyes.

 

“Thank you,” he said, so softly he was sure Hux couldn’t possibly have heard.

 

“You’re welcome,” Hux replied.

 

\--- --- --- --- ---

 

No-one had any idea where Snoke was. No-one had any idea who to trust. It was him and Hux, and Phasma with her eyes on the door, waiting for a black SUV or a cop car or a knock on the door. Someone would come, sooner or later. Whatever Hux said, it had to end sometime.

 

But for now, Hux made him linguine, and brought the birds in so Kylo could feed them bits of dried mango, and Phasma read the news feed in a dry deadpan that somehow made the dissolution of everything they’d built almost funny. _It_ _’s over_ , Kylo kept thinking. _It_ _’s done_.

 

Then the burner phone Hux fished out of Kylo’s bloody clothes rang.

 

In the middle of the day when the neighborhood was quiet Phasma and Hux helped Kylo stagger out to Hux’s sedan. Phasma would have put him in the back, but Hux gave him the passenger seat, reaching over him to slide it back and give him room for his legs. Within an hour Kylo was asleep, comfortable for the first time in days.

 

When he woke up it was night, snow drifting down around them as they wound their way through the hills. Phasma lay slumped over in the back, quietly snoring.

 

“Are you alright?” Hux asked without taking his eyes off the road.

 

“I will be.”

 

They were already past The Hill, heading steadily inland towards the mountains. The last time he’d come this way, he’d been Snoke’s secret, the bogeyman in the closet everyone knew about but nobody could name. Now he returned a disgrace. A failure. Snoke had spent thirty years building the First Order and Kylo had torn it down in one. All because he hadn’t shot a girl.

 

Snoke had told him once that it wasn’t the police who brought the Empire down, or infighting or even his uncle. It was sentiment. He was right.

 

“I can’t give you what you want,” he said into the dim night.

 

“I know,” Hux replied. “I knew from the beginning.”

 

“But you did all this anyway.”

 

“I did.”

 

“Why?”

 

Hux smiled. “We’re on the same side. And it’s nice to have a friend.”

 

The rest of the night, they drove in silence, watching the mountains get closer and closer until they filled the world. Gradually the dawn broke pale and overcast behind them. Kylo didn’t know what waited for them. Would Snoke punish him or let him stew? Would they rebuild or fall apart? Was there even anything left to rebuild with?

 

As they pulled into the surprisingly crowded parking lot, Kylo glanced Hux’s way. He thought about sugar cubes, three turning to nine turning to twenty-seven, on and on into infinity. He thought about seeds. He thought about numbers and spirals and growing things. Maybe Hux was right after all. It wasn’t the end of the world.

 

It didn’t really matter. It would be what it would be.

 

Hux helped Kylo out of the car and Kylo leaned on him, smelling soap and birdseed. If Hux’s neighbor didn’t take good care of those birds Kylo would put a bullet between her eyes. He missed them already.

 

“I just realized,” Hux said suddenly as they approached the door. “Yesterday was New Year’s.”

 

As the door opened, Kylo laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> By the way, I drew fan art of my own story because I am an egomaniac.   
> http://squintlysays.tumblr.com/post/143611862251/you-remember-how-i-said-i-was-gonna-do-art-of-my


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